


Matters of Academia

by skorpsion



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 15:09:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8583106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skorpsion/pseuds/skorpsion
Summary: The ------ Society is an exclusive, secretive club of utter distinction! Fine wine (of course it isn't blood), fine company (of course they aren't madmen!), fine knowledge that defies the laws of reality and threatens to twist your mind into nothing more than a fire-crisped curl. [A series of short stories about what happens when you collect enough Correspondents and Glassmen into a single room.]





	

“Of course, this isn’t forbidden knowledge, so you shouldn’t refer to it as such. I wouldn’t want you to, ah, make a bad first impression.”

You stop in your tracks. The professor- if he’s even that- is leading you along an abandoned hallway of the University, cobwebs and sorrow-spiders lurking in the corners. It does not, in fact, look like any academic institution you’ve ever seen. The sorrow spiders look remarkably inattentive, for one. “Didn’t you say you had forbidden knowledge for me?”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it forbidden, not when we’re still on university grounds, of course.” Is he being intentionally obtuse? You’ll humour him, but if he ends up another raving madman, you’ll have some very strong words for him. Words written on your fists.

“And if it isn’t forbidden knowledge…?” You edge into a careful question.

“You’re a Correspondent, are you not? Aren’t you familiar with this concept?” You can’t tell whether or not you should be offended, but he seems sincere enough. The man wrings his sweaty hands and looks at you. You suddenly regret shaking his hand earlier today, but it seems he’s taken the look on your face to be confusion. “The… opposite of knowledge, as it would be. The Last Alphabet, as you know, is knowledge, but the opposite of it is true as well. Or false. Circumspect in how it’s used but… still there.”

The hallway is growing darker and dustier as you go. He doesn’t seem to mind, and cheerfully adjusts his spectacles, even after it’s plainly obvious that no amount of adjusting one’s spectacles would help. You step over a jagged hole in the ground, barely visible as even an outline under cloak of darkness. Somehow, he’s still going, even while he waves his hands and rants.

“Well, it’s really not there. What is, and what isn’t. What will be, and what isn’t. The things parallel and opposite to those at once, the spaces found between what we know, what we can see.” He steps over a cobweb, and you see glittering eyes in the darkness. You avoid it as well. “Writing words, unwriting them, and knowledge of what is, compared with knowledge that is not… Things that don’t exist, things that do exist. Their existence, or, ah, lack thereof. Different, yet… We’re here.”

He stops in front of a nondescript door. It’s no different from the others, still the same dust as with every other door in this place, but something about it makes your vision cross. The lines are wrong, straight in a way that isn’t, the whorls in the wood mind-bendingly traced in the thin lines into the grain. Your eyes water just looking at it, and your guide obligingly passes you a handkerchief.

While you dab at your eyes (is that blood?), your guide finally takes a sidelong glance at your face, and startles. He steps back, and looks at you again. He blinks angrily (angrily?) at you and sputters. Giving up on words, he shoves a slip of rough satin into your hands. You turn it over, feeling it between your fingers, and it’s a simple black eye mask, stained at the corners and ever so slightly crusty around the eyes. Dark stains, with a residue that actually crumbles in your hands. “Y-you! What are you doing? Take this!”

You slip the mask on. It clings to your face like a malignant spider, but it at least stays. It’s a little scratchy around the edges. Like spider legs, but you ignore the paranoid itching feeling that tugs at the edges of your face. Your guide looks at you warily, before he nods at last, like everything’s been accounted for. He steps back, finally letting you see the door in all its glory. The wood looks ordinary, but it also throbs in front of your eyes, in a way that makes a nerve in your head  _ pulse _ in time with an unknown beat. Som part of your mind shuts down, numb and powerless against the door that shouldn’t be a door.

Your guide puts his hand up, a scant inch away from actually touching the door. The rhythm of the pulse in your head almost makes sense, a double beat, timed a moment displaced to itself, pulsing and not-pulsing on every half-step, a heartbeat-

“Watch carefully.” You’re no longer looking at the door. His hand raps against the door once, almost like a friendly starter. The echo of the wood rings out in a way that it shouldn’t. And he knocks: his hand turns, and taps on the door, and then he knocks. He knocks. He knocks again, and-  _ light _

Warm light spills out from behind the door. It reminds you of the sun you forgot, and when the doorman leads you in (what is that on his face?), you realise the entire inside room is covered in honey-coloured crystals that bounce lamplight off silk drapes. The silk and brilliance almost makes you ignore the thick lead plates bolted to the walls, light dipping into carvings over their surfaces. The engravings aren’t familiar to you; they’re jagged and broken and obtuse in their angles in all the ways the Correspondence isn’t, and your guide whispers in your ear: “Don’t look too close.”

You tear your eyes away and focus on the face of the woman addressing you. Her mask is white, and stitched to wrap white silk around the contours of her face. It has no eyeholes, you notice with a start.

“Welcome, -------! Charmed to meet you.” She smiles at you, and even though her mask (white silk, not spidersilk, not surface-silk) covers her eyes, her face is turned towards you. Her lips turn up in the faint suggestion of a smile. She offers her hand to you, but you decline by shaking your head, not thinking. (She shrugs and puts her hand back down. She saw you nod.) “We’ve heard all about your exploits in the university, I’m glad you’re here to join our society.”

Around you, others are mingling. They hold thin-stemmed glasses of red liquid, but when you look closer, you realise hardly any of them drink from their glasses. You notice that all of them are wearing masks, and many of them are eyeless, like your conversation partner. They still walk around the crowd with ease, stepping around obstacles like they can see them, chatting to others about things that… don’t sound quite right. The syllables are clear and sharp, but the words escape you like water. The words flit free from your mind, and the concepts escape you as soon as you can hear them. For some reason, you feel like the conversation matters aren’t meant for you to hear.

Behind you, a voice purrs something in a language you don’t understand, something like an admonishment in more syllables than you’d expect. You feel a hand on your shoulder, and it pats you, once. When you turn, the presence is gone, leaving you to stare at the cutlery. A masked shadow flits, in the corner of your vision, and you suppress the urge to look and a see where it leads you. Instead, you focus harder on the cutlery.

On the table, a crystal rests next to a gilded arrangement of truly terrifying soup spoons. You pick the crystal up from its place, and it sits in your bare hand, warm. The surface is carved with thin spirals and dots and crossed with lines. A true crystal, not glim, adamantine and precious in the light. It isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen before, light refracting brilliantly off its facets, and something tiny is curled inside that you can’t quite make out in the dizzying light. Although it’s dreadfully improper, you find yourself turning to the woman, already asking the simple question, “What is this place?”

She frowns and puts down her glass of what may be wine. It lands on the table with a little clink. You feel like you might have just committed a terrible mistake, but then she smiles again with teeth like broken glass. A hand rests over yours, and the crystal is forced back down into the table. “Ah, I wouldn’t have known you were so very, very young! This is our canonized meeting hall, the place where light meets light.”

It explained absolutely nothing. “What does that mean?”

Instead of saying a word, she puts a finger to her lips, and hands you your own fluted glass. It’s deep amber, almost like prisoner’s honey, but it doesn’t shine in the light. You turn it, and hold it up towards the light of the ceiling crystals, but it stays resolutely flat and unwilling to acknowledge any changes in its surroundings. You swish it, a little twisting motion, but it barely even sloshes in its glass. You hold it up against your lips.

When you catch a whiff of it, it smells like nothing less than liquid glass and light. Clear, bright, and like absolutely  _ nothing _ you can name. Like the snap of cold air, and the sharp scent of winter. Nothing about it suggests that it’s remotely safe, much less edible in the slightest.

You look to her. She looks at you. You look down to the glass, and notice how the drink- if it’s even that- doesn’t show your reflection. There’s no depth to the thing at all, like the world is just… ignoring it. You could write a thousand scholarly essays about it in the university, if you wanted, despite the lack of depth in its appearance.

Looking up from the glass, everyone in the hall seems to be staring at you, even through eyeless masks. The drink doesn’t look appetising in the slightest, but you hesitate for just half a heartbeat before downing it all in a single gulp, with all those eyes on you. It flows down your throat like a mug full of razors, cold down to your flesh and chilling your now aching jawbone. It tastes… it really does tastes like almost nothing, like if you just rolled your tongue over a chilled wineglass, with a twist of something sharp and plain, and a hint of blood. Glass crunches and rolls in your mouth, and it flows down your throat richer and smoother and deeper than any fine wine or honey you’ve ever sampled before.

You swallow. There’s a sound, like the tinkle of shattered glass, far away. Your glass is empty, now. You lick your lips, the phantom taste of blood still lingering.

There’s a brief moment of silence, pure silence without even the sound of a drawn breath, before the entire hall explodes into manic applause. Cheers ring out like fluted notes, and hands surround you, patting you on your back and slapping you amiably over the shoulder. The candleflames around the hall flare higher, brilliantly blazing with amber light flickering across the masked features of your new compatriots.

“Welcome!” they say. “Wonderful!” They all clap, smiles spread over their eyeless faces like disembodied limbs. One even takes an opportunity to hug you, unseemly as it might be, but you return it nonetheless.

Your empty glass falls to the table, now ignored without its contents. You smile back to them, your lips stretching thin and bloodless, beneath the edge of your mask.

It hurts. Every surface inside you feels like a separate knife edge, like you’ve swallowed crushed glass. You think you can taste red on your teeth, and you only smile harder, and join in on the raucous laughter like one of them.

“Not doing so badly, I hope?” A large man claps you on the back, and his grin is wide, the furrows between his teeth filled in by something red and sticky but not exactly blood. Your head  _ pulses _ , and the crushed-glass feeling creeps deeper into you. You keep smiling, and he laughs. “Wonderful! Good to see a new face around here,” he says before clapping you on the back and disappearing back into the crowd.

He disappears so quickly you barely realised he was gone, and that you’ve been left staring at nothing but the crystal chandelier in the ceiling, the topaz light almost too bright to look at now. You squint into it, a little, and you can almost see shapes if you tried. Wriggling ones, curlicued ones. Like lightning under the sun.

Bright. It hurts to look at, but you keep watching. They twist into each other. Words, almost like the Correspondence.

The shapes don’t resolve clearly in your eyes. It could very well be a trick of your light, but the crowd around you melts away when you look into it.  Around you, your inattention only seems to have encourages them to congratulate you more, but you don’t have time for that. You stare deeper into the corona of light that fills the hall, the sticky light that pours from the crystals on the walls, and you can taste glass again.

Brilliant, like broken laughter in snowfall, or twisting an ice cold knife into your gut. You lick your lips, and you actually do taste blood.

You finally succumb to the urge to scream. 

**Author's Note:**

> Tag suggestions would be appreciated, as would any helpful reviews.


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